The Devil's Acre (22 page)

We have to go, Edward thought – this instant. He strode forward, seized the Navy from Richards’s uncertain grasp and started to pull him towards the exit. People parted fearfully before them, giving the gun as wide a berth as possible, jostling each other aside to get out of their way. The serving girl with the bloodied slippers had become trapped somehow at the top of the stairs, pushed up against the doorframe by a fleeing customer and now too scared to move. Fourteen years old at most, her thin, freckled face was ashen with fright. She’d clasped her hands before her chest in a desperate prayer; and as the Colt men approached she sobbed out a plea for mercy, hunching her shoulders and lowering her head, trying to make herself as small as possible.

This sight made Edward feel acutely ashamed. ‘We won’t hurt you, miss,’ he managed to say. ‘Please believe me. We are professional men – respectable men. This was an accident.’

She nodded, mumbling something, but her gaze did not
leave the pistol in his hand; and as he stepped past her onto the staircase she flinched in terror, squeezing her eyes shut as if expecting execution.

The middle of St Martin’s Lane was clogged with bleating sheep. Lost on its way to a market somewhere, this flock was packed in tightly around the drays, cabs and carriages, aggravating horses and confounding the weary efforts of its shepherds to move it up towards Long Acre. This was good; it would prove a certain hindrance to any immediate attempts to pursue them. Still dragging Richards by the arm, the secretary forced a path through the crush of woolly backs, making for a shadowy alley that led away in the direction of Covent Garden.

Edward had been holding the Navy just inside the flap of his jacket. After about fifty yards they rounded a corner; he took the chance to stop, knock out the remaining charges and secure it properly beneath his clothes, shivering slightly at the trace of warmth that still lingered in the steel. The press agent had propped himself against a wall and was panting hard. A gas-lamp flickered to life in an upstairs window, bathing him in yellow light. There was a strange expression on his flushed, angular features – equal parts smirk and grimace.

Facing him, Edward found that he was almost too astonished to be angry. ‘What the devil was that, Richards?’ he hissed. ‘He might well
die,
you know, from such a wound! Why, if they’d caught us in there, we’d –’ He couldn’t finish the sentence. Everything would surely have been over for them both. ‘What were you
thinking?’

Richards, caught in the grip of a coughing fit, could only shrug.

‘That was the cockney gas-man, I assume – the fellow you suspect of seducing your wife. Did you take us in there deliberately, looking for him, once you saw that I had the gun? Was it all planned?’

The press agent tried to laugh but couldn’t quite manage it. ‘It seemed a rational course,’ he protested weakly. ‘What more can I say?’

Despite his attempt at offhandedness, Richards was evidently shaken by what had just occurred. Edward’s claim
to the serving girl had been correct – the shooting had been an accident, the error of an over-excited drunkard.

‘You didn’t actually mean to hit him, did you?’

Richards rubbed his nose on his sleeve, making a ragged, snuffling sound. He looked haggard and thoroughly out of sorts. ‘Dear Lord,’ he whispered, ‘I do believe I feel rather sick.’

Shouts echoed over from the direction of St Martin’s Lane. Edward put a hand on the press agent’s bony shoulder, easing him away from the wall and propelling him firmly down the alley.

‘Come,’ he said, ‘let’s get us to Holborn. You can stay with me tonight.’

Half an hour later Alfred Richards was fast asleep on the hearth of Edward’s parlour, wrapped in the secretary’s winter coat. Edward sat in the other room, on the edge of his bed. Holding the Navy, staring at it, he recalled the frantic movements of the wounded man’s hands as he toppled backwards; the panicked stampede towards the stairs; the streak of fresh blood on the serving girl’s shoes. Most vividly of all, though, he saw the abject fear on this young girl’s face – fear he had inspired. Edward believed that he was, at his core, a good man; yet to that girl, when wielding this pistol, he had appeared a thoroughly convincing killer.

This was a raw, mortifying memory. Looking over at the window, he considered going back out into Red Lion Square that very minute and dropping the gun down the nearest drain. Even as he thought of this, however, he knew that he could not do it. He had invested too much of himself in the Colt Company. Throwing away the Colonel’s gift would be a betrayal of his own ambition; a rejection, somehow, of the golden future he’d dreamed of so feverishly.

But neither could the weapon possibly go back in the bureau drawer, to be seen every time he reached for some ink or a sheet of writing paper. He took out his oldest shirt, wrapped it tightly around the revolver, and then pushed this awkward bundle as far under his bed as it would go.

‘A whitebait supper,’ said Martin, breaking a long silence. ‘That’s what’s needed.’

He fed his rolled-up cap between his hands, squinting out at the sun-scorched grass and the Sunday crowds that lounged across it. The Rea family sat close to the summit of the hill, about fifty yards from the Royal Observatory, in the deep shade of an oak. The village of Greenwich was arrayed before them, its thriving tea-rooms spilling over into the park. A small fair had been set up in front of the long white colonnades of the sailors’ asylum, with a coconut shy and a waxworks tent; music from a fiddle and a drum drifted in and out of earshot, smothered by the torpid, late summer air. Church bells were tolling, in Greenwich itself and all along the valley towards London, announcing the afternoon service; those in the park, however, dedicated solely to recreation, paid them no mind. Behind this scene wound the great river, littered with papery sails. Out here, past the factories and the sewer outlets and the dockyards, the water lost much of its corruption and began to approach its natural colour once again.

‘Aye,’ he declared, as if the decision was made. ‘Come, girl, that’ll sort us out. At the Trafalgar, down by the river – a plate of whitebait and a glass of ale.’

Martin looked around for his child. Katie was off investigating the trunk of the oak, supporting herself against the ridged bark. He said her name; she gaped back blankly for
a second, and then fell into a sitting position. Amy, curled up on the ground, still had not stirred. Martin patted her haunch, feeling the hard jut of her hip-bone. Grief had denied his wife anything but the very lightest sleep for almost a week now. She was living in a state of exhausted, stupefied despair, unable to work or eat, and barely able to walk more than a couple of dozen steps. This excursion, taking them well away from the Devil’s Acre, had been intended to bring her some relief. But their third-class carriage had been brimming with little babies, it had seemed, every one of them screaming with lusty health, and the streets of Greenwich even more so; after a few minutes of this Amy had ground to a halt like a stubborn mule, leaving Martin to carry her, more or less, to this secluded corner of the park, their bawling daughter tucked under his other arm. Here she had collapsed into her current position, not moving or speaking for over an hour. It was good that she’d taken some rest at last, he told himself, but it was time for more – for sustenance, for life and human society. He patted her again.

Wiping the strands of dark, tear-soaked hair from her cheek, Amy shifted onto her back. ‘Martin,’ she said, her voice hoarse and edged with bitterness, ‘do you feel anything at all?’

He sighed. This once more. ‘How can you ask me that?’

‘I know how you Irish are. You’ve seen everything, ain’t you? Nothing else compares with what you’ve already lived through. No other loss is as painful. This is – is
measly
to you, ain’t it?’ She was starting to tremble. ‘Nothing very much?’

Martin twisted his cap as tightly as he could, looking down fixedly at his crossed legs. ‘I am mourning, in my way. You can be sure of that.’

Amy wasn’t listening. She sat up suddenly, rubbing her palms against her eyes, smoothing down her hair and picking up her bonnet from where it had fallen on the grass. ‘We must leave this city. I can’t stand it no longer. It ain’t safe for Katie; Heavens, Martin, it ain’t safe for
us.
America – we must go to America.’ Her tone grew imploring. ‘Talk to your
Mr Quill. Tell him that you wish to go to the Colt factory over there to – to learn more about the engines. To finish your training. He’ll listen, won’t he?’

Martin found that he could easily imagine a fine new life for them in Hartford. There would be a pretty cottage in a Connecticut lane, with Katie skipping around the flower-garden; formal tutelage in gun manufacture, followed by a long-term contract on a master engineer’s wage; a lasting friendship with Ben Quill, continuing until they were both old men. It could not happen, though, not yet, no matter how much he might want it. He had to stay loyal to Molly and his brothers. Caroline was getting them their guns. The moment of action might not be too far off now.

He shook his head. ‘It ain’t that simple.’

‘Because of Slattery, you mean – because of this debt you all kept hidden for so long. You have a
family,
Martin. You have a child. What’s to stop us going – making our arrangements in secret and then sailing away from this place forever?’

Martin glanced across at Amy; she was working herself into a rage. The debt she spoke of was an out-and-out lie, a story spun with the Mollys’ collaboration to convince her to enlist her sister to their cause. It had been a necessary deception. The truth was too much of a risk. He hadn’t liked doing it, and had felt guilt over it since – but he was damned if he wouldn’t make her understand exactly what was at stake for him here.

‘You’re asking me to betray my closest friends,’ he answered angrily. ‘We are bound together, Slattery and me – all of us. We are
brothers.
I won’t leave ‘em like that. D’ye hear me, Amy? I bleedin’
won’t.’

This did not chasten her in the least. ‘That man hates you, Martin,’ she spat back. ‘Can you really not tell? He hates you for siring English children, for mixing your precious Irish blood, and will grind us into the mud to show it.’

He looked up sharply; there was something new here. ‘What’s this? What are you talking about, girl?’

She hesitated, lifting her chin a little. ‘I heard him talking. At – at Michael’s wake. Saying the most dreadful things. That our boy was a – a half-breed. A Protestant mongrel.’
Here she faltered, shaken by the recollection, brushing away a fresh tear; but she took a breath and made herself continue. ‘That it was better that he should have died in his infancy, before he could – could –’

Martin’s hand shot out, seizing her arm. ‘Pat Slattery said that? He said
mongrel?
He said that to
you?’

Amy made a vain attempt to wriggle free, frightened by his reaction. ‘N-not straight to me face, no, but I heard it clear enough. He was with some of the others – Owen and Joe, I think, and –’

A mighty blaze of light blasted out everything, sweeping away the rest of Amy’s words, casting the peaceful park into a roaring forge of blinding whiteness. Martin felt a burning sensation in his throat and chest; he realised that he was out on the hillside, breathing hard, racing upwards in the full glare of the sun; and then he was shoving through a game of some kind, knocking people aside and cursing at the very top of his voice. There was but one thought in his mind. He was going back to Westminster right away, he was going to find Patrick Slattery and he was going to kill him. He was going to wring the life from that wretched bastard with his own two hands. A player from the game he had spoiled grabbed hold of his shoulder, seeking to chide him for his interruption. Martin turned on this fellow almost with gratitude, punching him twice in the face with such unrestrained force that he went straight down and did not rise again.

Then he heard her, singing somewhere in the distance in that cracked bell of a voice. Molly was in the park with him. She’d pushed her way up through the baked turf of Greenwich and was now moving among the trees at the hill’s summit, running her bony fingers through the lowest leaves. He tried to look at her; the sunlight was simply too powerful, however, dissolving everything and making his eyes ache. But she knew that he needed her. Was she leading him onwards? Was she beckoning him to her side? Martin continued uphill, and before long found himself at the end of a neat oak-lined avenue with flagstones underfoot. Around him were people with telescopes in their hands, exchanging
idle observations, looking off towards London and the distant dome of St Paul’s. He paused, panting, momentarily lost; but her song found him again, reaching out to him from the far end of the avenue. And there she was, by God, dancing across the stones like a dark, ragged sprite, skipping through a set of tall iron gates and out into the countryside beyond. Surging on with the last of his strength, Martin went after her.

Molly had led him to a wide, rutted road – the main road back into the city. He was sweating, struggling for breath and sobbing too. Staggering to a halt, he bent over and put his hands on his thighs, watching tears and drops of perspiration splash together against the dusty ground. For the first time in many months, his thoughts were of the Athlone workhouse, of his beloved mother and sisters, all five of whom had met their ends in the same weekend, claimed by a fever that had rushed through the weak, half-starved inmates like a mounted charge. As always, he’d been off plotting a riot or an assassination or the burning of some building or other; and by the time he reached Athlone on the Monday all but Sally, the youngest and last to die, had already been committed to the earth, buried in a mass grave outside the workhouse wall.

The place itself had sickened him past all expression. The moaning hundreds, mostly women, children and the elderly, who were packed into every damp, barren room; the hopelessly thin broth, served but once a day, on which they were supposed to survive; the skeletal dead heaped in the yard, through whom he had to rummage to find what remained of his sister. It was impossible to comprehend the sheer quantity of misery contained within the Athlone workhouse. Every single person under that leaking roof had a tale of terrible injustice to tell – a story to inflame the soul with righteous anger and break the heart with pity. And Sally herself, once able to run a plough truer than any man, was but a faded, broken wisp of what she’d been, with every painful stage of her demise impressed into her teenage face. Martin had carried away her straw-light body on his back, burying her beneath a tree on the borders of what, only a year before, had been the Rea farm. It had been that same
evening that he’d caught his very first glimpse of Molly Maguire.

These black memories brought him abruptly to a far more recent time, only a few days past, in the bleak corner of Westminster that served as the Catholic churchyard – where, with Jack, he had carried that tiny coffin to its grave. He felt every sensation anew; the rope against his skin, and the pathetic weight at its end; the smell of wet clay, so strange in the dust and warmth of high summer; the quivering wail that had trailed from Amy’s lips, drowning out the priest’s final blessing, growing louder and louder as the earth had started to go back in. He could hear the puffing of his so-called brothers, of Pat, Owen, Joe and Thady, as they worked with their shovels – men he’d thought were ready to die for him, who he would surely have died for, yet who’d mocked his loss and insulted his boy within earshot of his grieving wife. Jesus Christ Almighty, he was going to
kill them all.

Martin swallowed hard, dragged a sleeve across his face and took in his surroundings. The road was quiet, the only traffic being a couple of light Sunday gigs and some solitary riders. Beyond it was an expanse of sun-browned heath; at its far side, shimmering in the heat, was another village, its houses and church arranged like cups around a jug. Off to his left, three horses stood drinking from a small pond, beneath a wilting willow. Molly was nowhere to be seen; nor did her song sound any longer in the dried-out air. He sat down at the side of the road, confusion cooling his blood, the mad fury that had carried him there rapidly ebbing away. What did she want of him? To start for London at once, along this road – to hunt down Pat Slattery and mete out punishment for his unbrotherly words? To dislodge him, perhaps, and lead the Mollys himself? Or something else altogether? Martin asked her for further guidance, for some sign of her will; but she was utterly gone.

A clear image of his wife and daughter, sitting together under that oak, waiting helplessly for him to return, cut through his perplexity. Amy had no money, and was almost certainly too weak and befuddled to get the two of them home on her own. This was a real and immediate duty. A decent
man would not allow Molly Maguire’s mystifying riddles to keep him from looking after his family. Martin climbed to his feet with a groan and started back towards the park.

Slattery was in his usual spot at the Manticore, right at the ring’s edge. He’d pulled his cap low over his eyes and was biting on the stem of his pipe, following the goings-on in the ring with close concentration. As Martin watched he gave a snarl of encouragement, striking the barrier. There was a slip of paper poking from his fist; he had money riding on whatever contest was underway.

Few places offered action as good as that found in the Manticore on a Sunday night. The tavern’s modest upstairs room was always stuffed to the gills long before the hour appointed for the first match. This teeming clientele was drawn from every corner of London, and from several different levels as well; there were pockets of black top hats gleaming within the broad silt-bed of workers’ caps, and rumours persisted of certain members of the aristocracy paying the occasional visit, sloping across the river on the sly after a long day of sermons and domestic tedium. Attention was divided between the ring itself and the handful of bookmakers positioned at intervals around its edge. Every man in the room was shouting, either to place a wager or to cheer on one they’d made already, holding aloft betting slips, crumpled bank-notes or handfuls of sweaty coins.

Martin elbowed his way to the hexagonal ring and hoisted a boot up onto the top of the barrier. A sturdy, battered-looking terrier was shooting about within, his chewed ears erect, his docked stump of a tail wagging furiously. Before him, a swarm of plump rats was scattering in squeaking terror, pressing themselves into the ring’s shallow corners, piling up a dozen deep in their panic. With fierce excitement, the little dog seized a straggler and shook it hard, leaving the body immediately to take a dive at another. This second rodent tried to stand its ground, baring needle-thin fangs, but it did no good; the terrier’s jaws snapped shut again, swinging the corpse away to the other side of the arena.

Martin launched himself across the ring towards Slattery, knocking loose the oil lamp that was suspended from the low ceiling with his shoulder. There was a whoop of dismay from the crowd as the lamp dropped from its hook, breaking apart on the sanded floor. Landing at a bad angle in the darkness, Martin stumbled among the rats; he felt their fat, frantic bodies squirming across his calves and starting up his trouser-legs, desperate to escape the dog. Slattery was laughing at him from behind the barrier. Leaping forward, Martin charged into it, pushing it over, the white light roaring up around him once more; and the next he knew they were on the ground together, his foe pinned beneath him in a stream of fleeing rodents, his fist cracking against a nose, then a mouth, then an eye.